I’ve chosen to list my cons by category. I hope you’ll take these seriously. You’ll notice a correlation between some of these cons and Glassdoor’s recently released “Company Values”.
1. “We Are Transparent” is no longer true:
Glassdoor is a company that was built on the foundation of transparency. For a while, we were living up to this and maintaining a transparent workplace. However, senior leadership (primarily VPs and above) completely lost sight of this value in the last year or so. I cannot stress this enough - You CANNOT preach the value in transparency to your employees, and then completely hide details of major decisions taking place within the company.
For example, Glassdoor leaders, including Christian (CEO) and our Chief Economist, spoke in front of our entire workforce on multiple occasions to reassure us that Glassdoor was going to make it out of these COVID-19 times just fine. They told us we should not be worried, that Glassdoor made financial decisions in the past to prepare for something like this, and that we will protect our people AT ALL COSTS. They then put a surprise meeting on our calendar to lay off 300 employees, including President Club Winners, Top Performers, and some of our most Amazing Leaders.
What they (Christian) neglected to even hint at was the fact that they had a different plan for Glassdoor - one that makes the company look a LOT different than it did a week ago. They had a meeting with the entire workforce the day after they laid us off to lay out a detailed restructure plan, with prepared materials, which had to take months or even the whole year to plan out with Indeed. Seems pretty convenient that they used COVID-19 as an excuse to execute a wildly different plan for the company. When Glassdoor was purchased, leadership repeated SO many times that we would not merge or start working too closely with Indeed. It is also unbelievable that Indeed did not lay off any employees - they just took our jobs and Glassdoor didn’t even offer reps/managers the opportunity to stay on the team (again, MANY of these laid off reps/managers were top performers).
2. “We are Innovative” …boy, I wish that were true:
There were zero MEANINGFUL changes, advances or additions to Glassdoor’s GTM product suite in years. Sure, we would come out with some small update or addition to our solution from time to time, but it was never a change that prospects/clients deeply cared about. When entering into a discovery call, there was no way I could respond honestly when a prospect would say “I’ve spoken to Glassdoor multiple times. Your team keeps reaching out about new updates. Has your product changed at all or do you have any new products?” It was pretty embarrassing and made it difficult to effectively do the job.
3. “We Are Good People” …well, you used to be:
Again, 300 people laid off, NOT based on performance. We are the people that built Glassdoor’s culture DESPITE leadership challenges. We worked incredibly hard for the company, and we made Glassdoor into what it was DESPITE our out of touch leaders. Glassdoor is 1 million percent NOT the same company it was a week ago. If you are attracted to roles at Glassdoor because of the culture, please do not be fooled. The culture will never be the same.
The video you see in the first tab of Glassdoor’s Why Work for Us section highlights the people at Glassdoor…Ironically it includes many people who were recently laid off.
4. “We Have GRIT”:
Growth: We were expanding, hiring, and looking to move into new offices in San Fran and Chicago. Obviously, COVID-19 impacted this and Glassdoor is no longer growing.
Results: Leadership knows how terribly they messed up last fiscal year when they made the books for hunter reps. It was an abomination. They divided books based on “spend potential”, which relied on incredibly inaccurate data in Salesforce. This meant that some of our best reps suffered and barely anyone reached their annual quotas. All we got was a small “sorry this was an oversight”, then the message preached to everyone was “keep working hard” …as if that were the issue. Great leaders and reps left Glassdoor because of how badly leadership messed up and because of the direction the company was going. This happened before layoffs were even in question, so Glassdoor was going downhill this whole past year.
Integrity: Most of us feel really let down that Christian and others did not even give us clarity or honesty about how Glassdoor was reorganizing with Indeed - they just blamed everything on COVID-19. This doesn’t ring “integrity” to me.
Teamwork: The time it took to make change or get simple projects done was ridiculous. For even the simplest change, we would have to wait on layers of leadership approvals, “leaders” dragging their feet, and conflict between leaders that have MBAs and those who did not delaying the process. It was so frustrating.
5. SDR Org:
While the SDR Org made some progress since year’s past, it was still a mess. Leaders having multiple long meetings weekly to try and make change, only to be pushed off by executive leadership as an afterthought. The SDR Org did not get the respect it deserves. These reps are the future of your sales Org, yet you consistently messed up their quotas, did not provide the correct training and enablement to help these reps succeed, and left everything on the managers’ plates to deal with. To all of the former Glassdoor SDRs reading this post: Know that you are incredibly valuable, and you were the lifeline of the sales Org. I’m just sorry executive leadership pushed you to the side.
6. Enablement:
Enablement was understaffed and could not provide the resources each Organization needed to succeed. Training and development were left on the shoulders of each manager at Glassdoor. Glassdoor does not have an official sales process or sales methodology. Therefore, SDRs and Reps alike had to work even harder to develop their own process and hopefully be successful. Luckily, this just made me better at my job. However, it is a disservice to your employees to not provide proper training.
7. CEO:
Christian took over for Robert as CEO, and things went downhill. Christian has shown on multiple occasions his inability to lead and get “buy-in” from his employees. From leaving meetings early that he was clearly unprepared for, to poorly delivering the news of layoffs, Christian seems to be in over his head. In one meeting, Christian bragged about creating the culture at LinkedIn…it left such a bad taste in so many mouths. Glassdoor is not LinkedIn, and I can promise you Christian had nothing to do with Glassdoor culture when it was strong – that was 100% the employees.
8. Things I unfortunately dealt with while working at Glassdoor:
Glassdoor preaches transparency and even released a “Know Your Worth” tool to help candidates calculate what salary they should be making in their given field. This is SO ironic because my colleagues and I were specifically told we shouldn’t talk with one another about how much money we make…at the most “transparent” company around. It turns out this was preached to us because we were not all making the same amount.
For example, I was being paid less than 85% of my colleagues. Let this sink in for a minute…I had a longer tenure at Glassdoor than any of those colleagues, I had the most experience at Glassdoor compared to those colleagues, and, like myself, these colleagues had zero management experience before entering into these roles. I was also told I absolutely 100% could NOT negotiate a salary higher than a certain amount, then I come to find 85% of my colleagues were being paid above that amount. Shocking for a company that talks so highly about equal pay for equal work.
There were a couple examples of male employees that were acting inappropriately at Glassdoor. I won’t go into the details here, but what I will say was during a full-blown HR investigation into one employee, for whatever reason leadership decided he could stay in the office and continue working while this was going on. Imagine the discomfort, fear, and anxiety this caused the people who were involved in that investigation. For some reason, that always stuck with me. Poorly handled.
9. Important call outs:
If you would have asked me to rate Glassdoor 1.5-2 years ago, I would have said 4 stars. I always pictured staying with the company for a long time, and I am grateful to a few of the direct leaders I had that always supported me.
Please do not respond to this review with a canned response.
Please do not cover mistakes with excuses, and please do not preach about “how well we are being taken care of” post layoffs. A Lot of the information you see above happened before layoffs.
Please do not brag about creating an alumni slack channel…most ex-employees are likely too uncomfortable to post in there anyway due to the fact that Christian is in the channel as well. It would be a much more effective channel if people could connect and speak freely with one another.
